Seismic bounce
There is no mention of diurnal movements in your report of the yearly seismic
cycle caused by pumping water in Los Angeles
(25 August, p 8).
During the construction of the 80-kilometre Orange River irrigation tunnel in
South Africa in the 1970s, water levels in boreholes were found to be tidal,
despite being over 300 kilometres from the sea and several hundred metres above
sea level.
They also fluctuated under railway traffic nearly 5 kilometres away. When one
tunnel drive intersected a fissure of over 7 centimetres, bearing water under
pressure that flooded 1500 metres of tunnel in 24 hours, borehole levels were
affected nearly a hundred kilometres away.
During the construction of the Jubilee Line extension to London’s
Underground, sophisticated monitoring of the existing 100-year-old railway
viaduct was installed. This was activated on a Sunday. By 9 am on Monday, the
construction tolerances had been exceeded. Panic ensued and the readings were
checked around lunchtime, and found to be back to what they were on the Sunday.
They were checked again late on Monday afternoon, and were the same as in the
morning. The viaducts were rising and falling under the influence of commuter
traffic.
Weeping reactors
Regarding the new Japanese design for a small nuclear reactor, I beg to
differ with the assessment of one of the “experts” stating that there was
nothing wrong with the basic design
(25 August, p 4).
Molten sodium cooling systems have a “weeping” problem, where the fluid tends
to squeeze through even the finest micro-cracks in materials. Whenever this
cooling material encounters water, the reaction is violent and explosive.
Also, less than 10 per cent of natural lithium is the isotope lithium-6. This
would require costly isotopic separation from the more common lithium-7.
Lithium-6 is used in nuclear bombs and if it got into the wrong hands could be
as dangerous as enriched uranium and reactor plutonium.
When lithium-6 captures a neutron, it can decay into tritium and helium.
Tritium is radioactive and can easily enter biological systems in water.
I’d say there’s quite a lot wrong with the concept of a small nuclear
reactor, and without stringent safeguards it could become an environmental and
proliferation hazard of the first order, especially in a country subjected to
numerous earthquakes and typhoons.
Price of the planet
I have been doing a fair bit of reading around the rather vague subject of
“biotechnology” lately, so I thought it would be a refreshing change to read
your feature
(18 August, p 30)
on ecology.
This turned out to be less of a change of scene than I’d hoped. The article
states: “We don’t even know how many species are out there . . .[and] the
numbers are meaningless until we know how the different species interact.” This
is remarkably similar to the state of biotechnology鈥攚e have the first
draft of the human genome, but it’s pretty meaningless until we know how the
proteins interact.
There is a fundamental difference, though. Biotechnology, which might create
new drugs that might save some people, is very well funded. Ecology, which might
save the world, is not.
Nuclear fallout
Your article “In the line of fire”
(1 September, p 4)
fails to state whether
nuclear warheads that have their boosters destroyed during the launch phase
would be likely to explode when they fall short of their targets. The
implication is that they would.
This is unlikely. Nuclear warheads only arm themselves after an entire
sequence of events, including a normal boost phase. Anyone designing a system
differently risks having the warhead explode on their own territory after a
misfire.
This is not to deny that a nuclear warhead impact, with kinetic energy and a
chemical explosion scattering radioactive debris, would be deadly. It would.
Just tens or hundreds of thousands of times less deadly than a nuclear
detonation.
We're no angels on Earth
In his review of Stuart Pimm’s The World According to Pimm
(18 August, p 50),
Fred Pearce complains about the author’s view “that there is a
natural landscape”.
“Now,” continues Pearce, “we are entitled to something more sophisticated.”
While it is true that there is not an ounce of soil that does not bear the stamp
of our species, this should not obscure the fact that there is a considerable
difference in degree of human impact between, say, the Serengeti and Hyde
Park.
It has become fashionable to ignore the fact that global biological diversity
would be greatly reduced if the Serengeti were opened to the same amount of
human influence that has shaped and is maintaining the Park. While Pearce is
right to say that we create as well as destroy, sadly that’s of greater
relevance for rats and weeds than eagles and cheetahs.
Kill the romance of pristine nature, fine鈥攂ut don’t supplant it with
the romance of human angels creating a new garden of Eden.
Letter
Ted Postol, the MIT physicist quoted in the piece, responds that US nuclear
warheads are not armed until the final rocket stage completes its powered
flight鈥攂ut this is purely an engineering choice. There is no reason to
believe that a terrorist state would not arm its nuclear warheads at the moment
they are guaranteed not to fall back on that state’s own territory. Secondly,
because of the lower speeds associated with re-entry at shorter range,
short-falling warheads will in almost all circumstances have an easier re-entry
than those that go the whole way. Even if a warhead tumbled through the atmosphere,
it probably wouldn’t burn up. In fact, tumbling warheads have been identified as a
first-order threat by the missile defence programme.
Letter
You ignorant, ungrateful Eurotrash. If someone attempts to nuke Americans
sleeping in their beds and we destroy the missile, you will blame US for the
debris and not the people who fired the missile. We saved you from the Germans
in two world wars, and the Russians since the end of the Second World War.
You’re just a mewling, whining group of clerks and merchants longing for the
safe serfdom of a monarch or dictator.
If you don’t like what we’re doing, too bad. Go stand in the tall grass and
watch! We will protect ourselves.
Letter
Warheads re-entering the atmosphere are thermally shielded to survive a
controlled re-entry. Uncontrolled re-entry would almost surely result in
relatively harmless combustion.
Aside from that, it is still preferable for a warhead to fall on someone
other than US.
We also need to remember that arms races are only undesirable for the losers.
This is a race we can, and must, win decisively.
Tagging dope
If it’s effectively impossible to test athletes for artificial insulin,
erythropoietin or similar drugs
(11 August, p 4),
why not add a marker chemical to the drugs during manufacture?
It would have to be harmless, persistent in the body and not found there
naturally. It would also have to be added to the drug by all manufacturers.
But it shouldn’t be too hard to persuade the pharmaceuticals companies to do
this, especially given a bit of political pressure from the world’s combined
sporting bodies.
Fax mating call
Following Feedback’s advice
(1 September),
I started surreptitiously learning
to distinguish the endangered mole cricket from the nightjar, doing my
entomological duty on my earphones in work time.
Several specimens of the diurnal human colleague became convinced that the
fax was trying to send them something but had gone wrong. If either nightjars or
mole crickets are rare these days, it might be they are trying to mate with
nocturnal fax machines.
Letter
You people have blown whatever credibility you possessed. What happens when
you “redirect” a disabled and likely fractured intercontinental ballistic
nuclear weapon? Nothing more than when a meteor enters the atmosphere. . . it
burns up. You can relegate yourselves to the sleaze status of the tabloids.
And don’t bother quibbling over nuclear contamination. We’ll all experience
that in the event of any sort of nuclear “incident”. Look at Chernobyl.
Letter
Furedi’s article, with its condemnation of the exaggerated claims for
negligence, does not give one of the main reasons for the phenomenon. This is
the growing tendency of courts to make awards not on the merits of a case but on
perceived need on the one side, and the ability to pay on the other.
This particular cat was let out of the bag several years ago when a pensioner
who accidentally wounded a thief attempting to break into his allotment shed
after dark had damages awarded against him. This caused so much outcry that the
judge published his reasons. Prominent among them was that the judgement had
cost the pensioner nothing because he was insured.
Furedi cites the case of a 17-year-old injured on a skiing trip. A person of
this age is, of course, considered old enough in law to marry, with all the
responsibility that entails, to decide his sexual orientation and to have sex
accordingly, to drive a motor vehicle on the public highway (which entails
minute-by-minute safety decisions involving not only himself but the public at
large), and also to take up a sport which has a certain element of risk.
So does it make sense to claim that the boy was incapable of realising the
dangers of off-piste skiing鈥攅ven before he was given several warnings? The
compensation, no doubt, meant a lot to him, and was seen by the school and its
insurers as a flea-bite. However, since the law does not yet permit adverse
judgments based on purse lengths, blame had to be allocated to the school.
No accident
Frank Furedi reports on the decision taken by the British Medical
Journal to ban the word “accident”
(25 August, p 48).
This is very disturbing. Will it develop into a new round of thought control via the
language, as in political correctness?
The new view is that if something bad happens, it must be someone’s fault and
they should pay. I have noticed this trend in the legal profession, led by the
Americans, but it’s becoming more and more widespread in the once self-reliant
but now increasingly litigious Australian community. No longer do we Aussies
“cop it sweet” and get on with life. Even injuries resulting from the patent
stupidity of the injured party are subject to claims.
All this in an era where scientific thought has well and truly shifted from a
mechanistic, deterministic universe to one where, at the most fundamental level,
probability and uncertainty underlie all physical processes. And at the
macroscopic level, chaos theory points out the fundamental unpredictability of
many processes.
Why then do lawyers, doctors and safety authorities insist that all bad
things can be foreseen and, by implication, prevented? Maybe Accident and
Emergency departments will have to change their names to “Injuries Caused by
Someone Else’s Negligence and Emergency Department”.
Banana boon
As coordinators of the world’s first project to sequence the genome of the banana
(21 July, p 7),
we’d like to reassure correspondents such as David Jones
(4 August, p 50)
who fear that genetic modification programmes will replace
non-GM programmes to breed better bananas. Information from the sequencing
project will speed up all efforts to improve the banana, whether conventional,
GM or otherwise. Once researchers have identified a gene which helps to protect
bananas against disease, for example, they can screen large numbers of
conventionally bred varieties while they are still plantlets to see if they too
have the gene.
We agree wholeheartedly with Jones that successes have already been scored by
conventional breeding programmes such as those at the Honduran Foundation of
Agricultural Research, which we have sponsored and supported. Conventional
breeding can deliver the goods, but it’s a slow process and has been underfunded
for decades. We’ll continue to back it, but it would be folly not to make use of
new advances in plant genomics.
Hundreds of millions of people depend on bananas for food and income. It is
precisely because bananas have been neglected by conventional research for so
long that the effort to sequence the banana genome will be so valuable, for
conventional breeders and genetic engineers alike.
BSE and milk
I read with interest the news that BSE is detectable in cow’s urine, and Bob
Jasper’s subsequent letter expressing concern that pastures could be
contaminated by it and pass on the disease
(18 August, p 52).
Urine is not usually a good source of protein, so finding BSE in it is quite
worrying. Milk, however, is replete with proteins, so it stands to reason that
the prion could be found more readily in it. This prospect is worrying for those
of us who abstained from eating beef but not dairy produce, especially given
that the very cows that would not be eligible for consumption if
slaughtered鈥攐lder cows鈥攕upply the most milk, and also given the
pooling that happens with the milk supply, ensuring any infectious agents get
spread far and wide. Obviously, the experiment has to be done. I, for one, will
be crossing my fingers.
Note that the concern over urine in pasture has been addressed in a
letter from Gino Miele of the Roslin Institute Midlothian (1 September, p
55)鈥抬诲
Making satsumas
The finding that just three of the many citrus varieties gave rise to all the others
(18 August, p 12)
is fascinating, but it’s debatable whether these three are the only species.
At present, human intervention keeps all citrus varieties reproductively
isolated from each other, and reinforces their distinctive phenotypes. The
original three differ not a bit from the others in this respect, so why should
they alone be considered species?
This raises the larger issue of why cultivated varieties of organisms should
not be considered species. If two organisms have distinct phenotypes and are
reproductively isolated, it should not in theory make any difference how they
came to be so. They ought to be considered separate species.
The distinction between natural and cultivated organisms, while convenient,
is hugely arbitrary, and has tended to distort discussion of such issues as the
net effect of human acivity on global biodiversity.
Foot in mouth?
The debate about vaccination against foot and mouth disease continues
(31 March, p 16).
For many months, probably since April, the British National Farmer’s Union
website (www.nfu.org.uk) asserted that: “Consumer organisations have made it
clear that they would insist on labelling of products from vaccinated animals
and retailers and caterers expressed severe reservations about selling such
products [from FMD vaccinated animals]”.
On the strength of this, the NFU challenged the government to buy up any
vaccinated stock rejected as “unmarketable” and has told farmers that
vaccination would make their animals worthless鈥攕o they should oppose it
and support the cull.
On 8 August, I asked the NFU to name the organisations that would insist on
labelling and those that had reservations about selling the products from
FMD-vaccinated animals. A reply was promised, but none was forthcoming. Over the
following weekend, the sentence above was deleted from the NFU website.
Letter
Most people, like your correspondents, have a misconception that organic
foods are not treated with pesticides. The classification of an organic food is
one which has not been treated with “synthetic” pesticides. There is an
extensive list of organic pesticides used on organic foods. The question is
whether these are safer than the modern synthetic variety. I do not believe that
they are significantly safer, or warrant such a ridiculously high price tag.
Organic pesticides
In his support for organic farming, your correspondent David Lort-Phillips
(25 August, p 54)
omits to say that in every environmental respect landscape,
animal welfare, soil maintenance and biodiversity鈥擨ntegrated Farm
Management is the equal of organic farming but carries no extra price tag. In
Britain the charity Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF) organises this form
of management.
Once it is understood that the overwhelming majority of the pesticides and
oestrogens in our diets comes from some 10,000 natural chemicals made by plants,
that are as toxic and as potent as anything the synthetic chemist can dream up,
pragmatic justifications for organic farming disappear, leaving only ideology.